“in a word: luxury articles. I do not wish to irritate Christa with them, her aquamarine gaze is already deeply sunk in the trout-blue of your gaze in order to find out whether you share her thought: namely, that I mythologize my background as a whore’s child . . . What I meant to say was simply this: I had been able to witness the ambassadors of the great cities lay their patterned splendors before my mother. (There was usually something for me too: a dearly loved stuffed dog named Bonzo, for instance—but let us forget these details, our chat is already overladen with them—yet on the other hand shouldn’t a good novel also be a cultural-historical catalogue?) In any case, for me it had been only a matter of a time before I would visit these cities and probably even live in them. Soon, I would drive through teeming streets in Uncle Bully’s Delage, be led by Miss Fern through vast parks to fountains spraying their water up to the clouds—so close that a puff of air, bewitchingly redolent of autumn leaves, fresh garden soil, gasoline, and roasted chestnuts, would carry a fine shower of the rainbow-flickering spray over me—and soon, one night, I would be in one of the luxury hotels of these cities, and could listen to the roaring surf of the streets while, with a beating heart, I tried to envision the images that would be unfurled tomorrow. . .
“Previously, I had, so to speak, viewed only the covers of their paperback editions, and very casually at that: with a glance, say, through a sleeping cabin window into the sooty pigeon-blue of a railroad station where, under the title (Bucharest, Budapest, Belgrade, Trieste, and so forth: édition spéciale, bonne pour les Balkans), red-capped (incidentally, extremely ragged) porters dragged baggage around, and the little wagon of oranges, chocolate bars, and lemonade bottles was always too far away for someone to call it over . . .
“and sometimes, as under a thumb cropping over the edge of a book, a brief glimpse of an open page: seen through a dueling network of struts and stays (while the train lumbered dully across a bridge), a street filled with bug-like vehicles and teeming ant-like people . . . and even this image had been alive with anxious promise . . .
“Now I was actually in one of the truly big representatives of those big cities. I had not yet penetrated to where its heart, beating red and blue, seemed to glow in a melting pot—but it was really just a matter of days. I had only to step out the door (I eventually did just that, but that’s another story) . . . in any case, I hope you understand that for the time being, I had no time to take precise stock of my losses. The world that I’d lost was still lying about me (if no longer quite intact, it could at least be found with relatively little effort) . . .
“But one day I would find myself walled out from that world by a neighing collective laughter. For it happened, you see, that at the local school of our district (when I was still in the same class as my Cousin Wolfgang, who was only a few months older than I and slow in his intellectual development) I was led astray by the Tempter. In contrast to Cousin Wolfgang, I was not shy. Miss Fern had taught me a kind of trusting frankness that made me unsuspicious of, albeit reserved toward, strangers. I did not hide the fact that I knew all sorts of things, that I could read and write and even chat in dainty childhood French and fluent nursery English. Vast amazement on all sides; a few of my schoolmates quickly moved away from me, while the teacher (who smelled dreadfully of old clothes), with a self-conscious grin, pressed his scraggly chin into his collar, as an intention warmly fermented beneath the Adam’s apple and the diaphragm to cozen me into becoming an instrument of humiliation for my coarse school-mates.
“It was not yet in my nature to see through such political maneuvers—that was to be the first fruit of my education—and after calling attention to myself by boldly letting the small, naked worm of my finger push out from the compost that was the mass of pupils, I presumed to announce that I could even recite a few stanzas of a rather difficult and very beautiful English poem. Very well! Permission granted. I was planted in front of the blackboard. The teacher stood by his desk with a squashed smile, embarrassed, twisting his brownish-yellow cuff. Hurling out my arm toward him, raising an accusing finger against him, I commenced:
Has God, thou fool! work’d solely for thy good,
Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food
(now, as Miss Fern taught me, face the audience!)
Who for thy table feeds the wanton fawn,
From him has kindly spread the flow’ry lawn:
(arm and finger thrust toward the ceiling)
Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings?
(shaking my head in ecstasy)
Joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings.
(taking a small step forward; then somewhat softer, more intimate)
Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat?
Loves of his own and raptures swell the note.
(again addressing the teacher, firm)
The bounding steed you pompously bestride
Shares with his lord the pleasure and the pride.
(thundering)
Is thine alone the seed that strews the plain?
The birds of heaven shall vindicate their grain.
(again to the audience)
Thine the full harvest of the golden year?
Pars pays, and justly, the deserving steer:
(proclaiming)
The hog that ploughs not, nor obeys thy call
Lives on the labours of this lord of all.
“Well, that was it. As I stood there, highly satisfied—Miss Fern would have praised me for an excellent recitation—there was silence. But then it broke loose. It began with one of the little friends with whom I was destined to sail out into the blue ocean of cheerful knowledge: an uncontrollable splutter emerged from his snot-clogged nostrils—and that was the signal for a collective discharge. They erupted. They howled and bawled with laughter. They doubled up, rolled over one another, curled up and through one another, pissed in their pants in fits of vulgar orgasm . . . and here I must try to be very clear in describing what this laughter produced in me. It will instantly put you on the wrong track if I tell you that my first emotion was erotic pleasure—yes indeed; I made the acquaintance of a feeling I had never known before, something that I now can name: mortification.
“And this was also (aside, naturally, from my Freudian lascivity as an infant, and so on) my first erotic stirring; more precisely: it intimately involved my first conscious erotic stirring . . . but don’t be so foolish as to let out an ‘Aha!’ (uttered with pleasurably closed eyes and leaving an aftertaste)—This delight, I tell you, was transcendental . . . You can believe me: I have since relived those moments thousands of times: I have had every chance for conscientious analysis. In the foreground—inundating me with a hot wave of blood—was: mortification. Behind it, something else opened up, and there the erotic budded. But needless to say, at the time I did not realize what it was. I merely sensed it. From then on, it was to remain in me as a certain urge, however ineffable.
“The connection between it and the yowling and neighing of my little schoolmates was as distant as that between, say, a cyclone and a solar flare. Sure, it had an immediate and painful effect. I saw the shaking and rolling of the little shorn skulls, the obscenely gaping mouth-caverns and red ears dissolving into a rainbow-sparkling radiance in a monstrance of tears, heard their roar through a sharp droning in my ears, tickled by a sobbing from my throat. Nevertheless, this was, so to speak, a straightforward matter: it erected the wall that separated me once and for all from any kind of fellowship, barricaded me outside the much-lauded community in which the others lived so well, so self-complacently. I, for my little part, was now assigned my destined place. I felt as lonesome and abandoned as the ace of spades in the hollow of a not yet apperceived recognition. And I was mockingly watched by the eyes of that model Florentine girl whom Miss Fern had planted as an anima in my soul . . . and my hatred of her moved into my dear endocrine glands and settled there for all time. Hatred: the “measuring emotion,” as Stella so accurately put it. I knew tha
t I would get my revenge. Understand me: Not on the dolts who laughed at me. They were already forgiven, for they knew not what they did. I wanted to take revenge on myself—revenge for the unforgiveable foolishness of my innocence.
“And that is why, dearest friend, this humiliating early experience regrettably did not have an edifying poetic consequence. I did not tarry in majestic isolation, filling the hollow of a not yet apperceived recognition with zealous study, safeguarding the dangerous terrain of the emotional world with solid knowledge—like for example you, honored friend, or like Cousin Wolfgang surprisingly enough on one fine day (which sadly Providence didn’t allow him to survive long either).
“No, for me that Arcadian land of culture has always been a steppe, in which I roam hungrily amidst the rubble of lost realities and howl at the moon in the cold leftover fire pits of departed nomads: still in the hollow of a not apperceived recognition, do you understand? . . . And even that just the core hidden in my being (but then I don’t have to tell you that): My vital self deserted with flying colors and joined the ruffians. For even though the laughter of my tormentors had irrevocably barred me from their community, I became the leader of their brutality. For twelve long years, I was the conductor of their collective baseness. Whenever anyone more finely textured, helpless, apparently awkward wandered into the common lowlands and stimulated the collective mirth, it was I who sounded the alarm with a first splutter from snot-clogged nostrils and thus gave the signal for a frenetic collective invitation.
“Only once did I reveal on what side I really stood. I have to beg for your kindly patience in this trial too, or my early experience will not enjoy the counterpoint that life manages to arrange so well. I’ll keep it brief: A few years later, Cousin Wolfgang’s educational path had already separated from mine. Uncle Helmuth’s explanation of the principle of the steam engine had not found the same swift grasp in him as in me; he was considered backward in many respects, anyhow, and so they decided to give him a humanistic education and me a more scientific one. I was thus well on my way towards the intellectual uniformity of Keyserling’s Chauffeurmensch and my only cultural accomplishments were occasional cartoons (drawn clandestinely under my desk, unnoticed by the teachers). They were accurate, mordant caricatures, and so successful that the fame of my genius reached the upperclassmen.
“A pupil named Czerwenka (isn’t it odd what trivial details stick in the mind?) was having certain difficulties in keeping up with his class and lacked even halfway decent marks in just about every subject. He turned to me with a request initiated with a poke in the ribs: Could I prepare a drawing on the theme of “summer,” a homework assignment, which he could hand in as his own?
“Why not? I even enjoyed the idea. Asking a few questions off the point, I took Czerwenka’s intellectual measurements and gazed at his thick face and ink-stained (incidentally, conspicuously small, effeminate) hands in order to fathom his psychology. In the very next class (descriptive geometry), I drew a picture of Summer such as might presumably be reflected in Czerwenka’s innermost being: a canal shore with the exposed innards of a gas plant in the background—everything shaped roller-like, a kind of cyclopean cylinderism—and in the foreground, a group of sphere-headed bathers, sinking elephant legs and barrel torsos into the sluggish water. Thick, sure contours—you would have recognized a talented imitation of Léger.
“Czerwenka was most satisfied. This was precisely what he wanted and would have put on paper, but, alas, he had no knack for expressing himself with a pencil. The drawing teacher seemed to know this too. He told Czerwenka point-blank that the drawing could not be his. Who had done it for him? Czerwenka, cornered, gave him my name. ‘I don’t believe you!’ said the drawing teacher and sent for me. The drawing teacher was a gangly, jittery, rather young man who, it was rumored, had an artistic private life: he was counted among the talents of the Viennese Secession, was honorably represented with dynamic pen-and-ink drawings in its annual exhibits, and taught at our school only out of sheer artistic destitution. His indifference to our achievements seemed to confirm this gossip about him. As for me, I had always used his classes to do my homework for the next few classes, where, in turn, I pursued my drawing activities. He had noticed this and had shrugged, with that scornful disgust that is the final weapon of an impotent teacher against the ringleader of class perfidy.
“For the first time, I stood before him face to face. ‘Did you draw this?’ he asked, holding the drawing out to me amid the tense silence of the upperclassmen. Czerwenka morosely nodded toward me, his eyes downcast. So I said, ‘Yes.’ The drawing teacher pushed a piece of chalk into my hand, pointed first at the plaster model of a flayed muscleman bending an imaginary bow in an unrealistic lunge, then at the chalkboard, and said, ‘Copy that!’
“I began at the nape of the skinned bow-bender and with one stroke drew the S of the back line down to the corded nodules of his buttock musculature and along the thigh, the back of the knee, the calf, to the heel—I got no farther. For the drawing teacher ripped the chalk out of my hand, peered at me wildly under the tangled shock of hair on his forehead, sized me up and down, and said, ‘You bastard!’ Stomping back to his desk and tossing the chalk into the dusty cardboard box at the blackboard, he muttered, as though to himself (but so loudly that everyone could hear), ‘And someone like this is vegetating in this idiotic school!’ Before reaching his desk, he turned back to me and shouted, ‘Tell your parents they’re morons—morons and criminals! Tell them that I said so. My name is Weidenreich—Leopold Weidenreich. Go on—get the hell back to your class!’
“An artistic temperament. Imagine the difficulties I would have caused him had I actually delivered his message to my foster parents. He seemed, incidentally, to have realized as much himself. Thereafter he never even deigned to glance at me, the striking Herr Weidenreich, and I remained untroubled by any effort on his part to cultivate my gift, the efflorescence of which promised so much that he could go off the deep end at the mere thought of its remaining undeveloped.
“The incident might have had no aftermath if I—yes, you see—if I had not been surrounded henceforth by an enigmatic aura—how shall I put it?—as though stamped with a mark of Cain that separated me from my classmates far more than my obscure background, my (now rather rusty) knowledge of languages, my hysterical clowning, and my bellicose quarrelsomeness. This aura rather annoyed them and turned them against me, and yet it had definite authority. A short time later, Czerwenka (six foot three and three years my senior, but now only one class away from me) advanced toward me to deliver the punches he had planned for me. I checked him with a single glance that blended grandeur and malice; in hunter’s parlance, the mere glance of my eyes drew an opaque veil over his. He took off with his tail between his legs.
“Incidentally, it would be appropriate to point out here that this aura of malicious grandeur was certainly not restricted to the milieu of my school in Hietzing. For example, I can recall with clarity the time when Cousin Wolfgang (who knew nothing about this incident with the art teacher) hissed at me in venom-bloated despair, ‘You and your arrogant ways—UNTO EVERY ONE THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN, AND HE SHALL HAVE ABUNDANCE!!!’ This could have been a proud moment in my young existence—just like that other moment, when you imparted the same words to me, your mouth aglow with loving envy. . . It could have been one of my great moments, except that (here, as with you, and also as with Weidenreich) the mere glance from the eyes of my anima (which eyes I had meanwhile removed from Miss Fern’s fading Florentine charge and inserted in various other heads attached to riper bodies) pulled an opaque veil over mine.
“But something else occurred after my being pilloried as a ridiculous bearer of culture and a somber member of the elect: I began wandering around the city. I sought the city. I played hooky, and rambled. I went on exploratory journeys through the streets of Vienna for days on end. I would come home in the evening, then, next morning, start where I had left off the previous day. My more than me
asly allowance went for trolley tickets. My scholastic performance declined accordingly. There were torturous scenes with Uncle Helmuth, and also with Aunt Selma, who could not bear having “her” child compare so shamefully with Hertha’s child. For Cousin Wolfgang was a marvel of scholastic triumph. He was soon wearing thicker and thicker glasses, in which you saw either a gigantically magnified pupil or yourself dwarfed and topsy-turvy. The fuzz of manliness erupted prematurely on his upper lip, pimply chin, and calves. His cowhide schoolbag, with its bleak barracks aroma of cheese sandwiches and wet bathing suits, a smell that announced his return when he came up the stairs, weighed a ton from all the books he carried—pure, sheer intellect in old, thick, musty tomes. But I was roaming about Vienna. With drawn flanks and Aunt Selma’s bewitched gaze. I was seeking the city in the city. With the drawn flanks of a stray cat and Aunt Selma’s spell in my eyes, I sought, in Vienna, the city of humanity: ANTHROPOLIS—
Abel and Cain Page 47
